Recipe For A Fantastic Manager

At one point, I’m sure you could address everyone at your company simply by standing up on a chair. After enough growth though, you will have taken on enough staff to need some managers at your company. In my way of looking at things, managers only have one job; to get the best out of the staff they’re in charge of. Here are some great traits to which will help a person do just that.

First of all, having a proactive, can-do attitude. Unless you’re in a very small minority, you probably had some kind of conventional job before starting your business. Cast your mind back to that, and you’ll realise that your manager often set the pace for the whole day’s work. If the manager came in down in the dumps, then productivity would slow to a crawl. If they were brimming with energy, so was the workforce.

A good manager has a consistent “work face”, and an attitude that encourages people to succeed. Obviously, they need to know what to handle delicately and what to act more frantically about. However, it’s generally better to look for managers with a proactive spring in their step.

Maturity is another important trait to look for when you’re picking the managers at your company. Your managers are going to be the effective “boss” on the office floor, and being in that position requires strong emotional intelligence. This is even more important when you consider that they’re one of the biggest representatives of the business’s core values and goals. If you always let your feelings get in the way of your professional intentions, your business would have never got this far.

Similarly, you need to be able to trust your managers to be mature, especially in high-stress situations. It may feel more straightforward to select employees based on their usual work performance. However, I recommend putting the decision off until you’ve seen this or that person perform under pressure.

A strong sense of accountability is another great trait which you’ll want your managers to have. All the best managers I’ve ever worked with have been absolutely obsessed with accountability. They realise that the success of a whole team is the success of their own abilities as a leader and organiser. At the same time, they don’t pass the buck onto one of their underlings when things go wrong.

Intimate and effective one-to-ones are a big part of reinforcing accountability in any workforce, so keep an eye on any prospects if you’re having trials. Look for managers who get invested with individual staff, and strive to help them learn and develop, rather than point out their flaws and have a tirade. Furthermore, a great manager is able to neutralise any conflicts in accountability if and when they come up.

When you’re wondering who should be in the next generation of managers at your office, be sure to keep a lookout for these traits. If you can find management who have all these qualities in abundance, you’ll have very little else to worry about!